Google Buys Startup Wavii in Move to Boost Knowledge Graph

Google has acquired news summarization start-up Wavii for more than $30 million. The deal was first reported by TechCrunch earlier this week and finally confirmed by Wavli in a post yesterday on their website:

You probably know us best for our app that takes the deluge of information streaming across the web and condenses it into fast, fun updates. While we won't continue to offer this particular service, we'll be using our natural language research at Google in ways that may be useful to millions of people around the world.

To all of our loyal Wavii users, we owe you a big thanks for all of your feedback and involvement throughout this journey. We look forward to taking our technology to the next level and delighting you with what we come up with next!

Seattle-based Wavii uses natural language processing technology to distil online news into topics the users most care about, whether it be politics, celebrity gossip or gadgets. According to reports, Apple had been interesting in acquiring with Wavii to integrate it with its Siri division, thereby forcing Google's hand.

Google's purchase of the startup follows a similar March deal by Yahoo, when it acquired news aggregator Summly for $30 million. Yahoo has just launched an iPhone app for Summly, allowing users to view summaries of news they are interested in.

Wavvii was founded by former Microsoft employee Adrian Aoun in 2009 and has raised around $2 million in seed funding so far.

The original TechCrunch report suggested Google may add Wavii's technology to enhance the Knowledge Graph results, though it could also be used on an assortment of Google products, including Now, News, and Glass.

The U.K. Supreme Court has granted permission in part for Google to appeal against a ruling relating to a dispute over the user information through cookies via use of the Apple Safari browser.
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